Street Show: ‘The Things Between Us’ is an exhibition of new work from 22 different artists distributed solely through a USB Dead Drop installed at 540 W. 21 St. (@ Eyebeam Center for Art + Technology) in New York City.
Dead Drops (started by Aram Bartholl) are USB flash drives installed in public locations (buildings, train stations, museums, etc) around the world to create an anonymous offline peer-to-peer file-sharing network.
For The Things Between Us each artist was asked to make a piece based on the idea of TRANSFER (whatever that meant to them) that would be unique and only available through the Dead Drop.
The Street Show exhibition format is an experiment in the absurd pursuit of creating scarcity in the distribution of digital media. Visitors to the Dead Drop are free to take a file, delete a file, take all the files and so on ad infinitum, the future distribution of the work is uncertain once installed.
It places the power of “ownership” of unique files in the hands of its audience and through this, hopes to reveal something about the culture and consumption of digital media.
The work presented on the drive may end up online, be deleted, remixed, vandalized, or perhaps even trolled, its fate is in the hands of those who seek it.
In the spirit of free art & technology, the initiation of Dead Drops and other similar projects (Speedshow / BYOB) this exhibition format is completely free to reuse and remix by any and all.
A full listing of Dead Drop locations can be found here.
Torrent can already be downloaded here.
